Josh's Brain Blog

An Unexpected Pachinko Machine Project, Part Two

Submitted by Josh on
I’d never laid eyes on a real Pachinko machine until this one, so I spent a long time at the sale trying to gauge whether it really worked or not. I didn’t know enough to be certain, so in the end I saw enough happening that I was willing to take a chance on it. It hadn’t been touched in a very long time, so our first step was to get as much dust and cobwebs out of it as possible with a rechargable air duster. After that, it took the better part of a weekend to work out why the firing mechanism didn’t actually want to fire, which helped me to learn about how the feeder tray and lower track worked to pay out winners. By the end of the first weekend, we knew enough to fire balls successfully into the play field, so we knew we had a working machine.

An Unexpected Pachinko Machine Project, Part One

Submitted by Josh on
I feel like a lot of kids, at least around my age, probably had little trinket Pachinko toys when they were younger; of course, pre-internet, I had no idea that’s what they were called as a kid but I definitely remember having a few small hand-held toys that more or less met the criteria. I actually remember my daughter having a little Mario-themed one that she got maybe in a Happy Meal or at a birthday party or something just a few years ago when she was little - though it’s just as likely that I’m imagining it. Anyway, I always thought the mechanics of the things were cool, and remained so once I found out about the real thing somewhere along the way, and I always thought it would be neat to have one (but not neat enough to actually go out and find one, I suppose). But now that we’re in 2026 and I have a little time and just enough disposable income, I stumbled across one at an estate sale and pretty quickly talked my way into buying it, with my daughter’s prodding, and bringing it home.

Project in Detail: Fuse Bead Color Matcher

Submitted by Josh on

My daughter's winter break got kind of blown up in 2022 due to some really broken weather patterns and Southwest Airlines' inability to cope with them, so we spent a lot more time at home than we expected. As it sometimes does, that resulted in a couple projects leveraging our big stash of Perler Beads, both in terms of making new designs and in sorting out some of our myriad colors that got mixed together.

Project in Detail: Caves of Narshe 25th Anniversary Logo

Submitted by Josh on

As I've now done for the last fifteen years, I've recently completed another alteration of the logo for my long-running website, Caves of Narshe, to celebrate the site's 25th anniversary. This one, while not altering the form nearly as much as the prior change for the 20th, takes the basic format of the current logo and does something very different with it to stand out from the site's long history.

Shifting a Legacy Site to a CDN, Part 1

Submitted by Josh on

In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

A Quick Infrared Photography Primer

Submitted by Josh on

This is a quick cross-post of a short article written for my photography website, explaining false-color infrared photo production. The term "infrared" when applied to photography might make one think of the type of "thermal vision" or "night vision" popularized by movies, but the reality is somehow both more and less dramatic. In the world of art photography, an infrared photograph differentiates itself from typical digital or film photography by way of revealing light that we, as humans, can not see through other means. This light is then interpreted by the artist from something invisible to something that is not quite real.